An Easter Egg is best described as a message or feature which is hidden in a piece of software, be it a DVD, CD, program, or video game. Below I’ve listed 10 Google-related Easter Eggs in no particular order, they are:

1. It’s been fixed now, but it used to be possible to ask Google Maps for directions from - for example - Providence, Rhode Island (in the US) to Rome in Italy (in Europe) and be told that you would have to swim many thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean in order to get there.

2. Famous photographer-evader Nessie the Loch Ness monster has been spotted just off the coast of Google. If you set your browser to the Beach iGoogle theme and wait until 3:14am, Nessie will surface from the sea for approximately 60 seconds. The rumour is that Google developers wanted to create a tribute to the mathematical quatity Pi (roughly equal to 3.14159). Similar instances that occur at this time on other themes include the Aurora Borealis appearing in the Seasonal Scape, or kitsune (mythical fox spirits common to Japanese folklore) appearing in the Tea House theme.

3. The Google calculator facility can often be a useful tool, but it is not without its fair share of easter eggs. Have a search for the “answer to life the universe and everything” and see what you get. Ever wanted to know the “number of horns on a unicorn”? Try searching for it now, and the calculator will let you know.

4. Ever wanted to momentarily pretend you were Elmer Fudd? Google gives you that chance with Google Elmer Fudd. Further possibilities include Pig Latin and even Klingon.

5. If you open up Picasa - Google’s free image software - and use the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-Y, a teddy bear will show up. The more you press it, the more bears will pop up, until they eventually take over the screen.

6. Included in the Spam folder in Google Mail, just above the “Delete” button and where you usually come across advertising spam of some sort, you’ll find various recipes that include Spam as the main ingredient.

7. Hidden within the Google Earth program is a flight simulator. Accessed by pressing Ctrl-Alt-A on the keyboard (or Command-Option-A for Macs), you’re given the chance to try your hand at piloting either a propeller-powered plane or an F16 jet. You’re also given a choice of starting from a number of famous airports. Controls are available, and I recommend you read them, as I crashed even before I’d taken off. Hopefully you’ll fare better, good luck!

8. Google Maps has a tiny character called the Pegman show up whenever you zoom in close enough to experience Google Street Views. Occasionally, depending on the time of year, Google dresses the Pegman up in different costumes. For example, at Halloween he becomes a witch, and at Christmas he becomes a snowman.

9. If you type in “google easter eggs” and hit the”I’m Feeling Lucky” button, you’re treated to a minigame in which you control a rabbit and have to catch eggs which then spell out the word “Google”.

The following isn’t really an easter egg as such, but I thought I’d include it anyway.

10. As part of an April Fool’s joke in 2007, Google decreed that it would be launching Gmail Paper. This system would allow a Gmail user to print their entire account’s worth of emails and have it shipped to them as a hard copy. No amount would be too much, as it was possible to “print one, one thousand, or one hundred thousand of your emails”.

Social media marketing is tricky, and a lot of people don’t fully understand the positives and negatives of integrating it into their businesses. I’m going to explain how your website will benefit from embracing social media.

The primary reason we work in social media is to get links. Clean, Google friendly backlinks.  It’s possible to generate thousands of them with a single article, just three hundred words could bring in more than ten thousand links.  Obviously, links bring good rankings on Google and will help your site become an authority site if marketed correctly.

Successfully marketing an article on the social networks also brings traffic, more than you could ever desire. We’ve launched articles that have had almost a million visitors. Unfortunately, the traffic is commercially worthless, you’re going to make almost no sales, get any sign-ups or achieve any direct return.  I’ve only ever heard once of a person making “proper” money from a success on the social networks, and that was just $11,000. 

Social Media success on your blog could also help you gain a few RSS subscribers, but I wouldn’t think it would add them in the hundreds.

Brand exposure is also a factor, however, most social network users don’t like commercial sites and the pages have to be “dressed down” in order for them to work. Hence, negating the “brand exposure” that having millions of visitors might bring.

Social media marketing is a great way to start your viral marketing campaign which again would bring indirect brand awareness. Viral videos have always worked well, and are working particularly well at the moment.

In summary, social media can be of huge benefit, if you realise how to use it to it’s full potential. As a webmaster or business owner, the benefit is indirect, mostly though increased link equity, which will bring the rankings and then the traffic. Using social media to create links is by far the most economical way of increasing your rankings on the search engines, and it is still within Google’s guidelines as an added bonus.

Below is a list of 10 successful Google Bombs that I’ve come across in recent years. Some of you may even remember them from when they were active. So in no particular order, we have:

1. “More evil than Satan himself” brought up the Microsoft homepage.

2. “Dumb motherfucker” linked to a site selling George W. Bush-related merchandise.

3. “Miserable failure” or “failure” on the 29th of September 2006 brought up the official George W. Bush biography.

4. In the run up to the 2005 UK election, “liar” linked to former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

5. A long-lasting and moderately successful bomb would be making the word “Scientology” link to Operation Clambake (www.xenu.net), an anti-scientology movement.

6. Another Scientology-related google bomb was born on the 29th of January 2008, when a google bomb linking the search “dangerous cult” to the homepage of The Church of Scientology was created.

7. Steven Lerner, the creator of Albino Blacksheep, created a joke webpage in 2003, which was titled “French Military Victories.” When searched for on Google, the top entry took you to a page that resembles google, but reads “Your search - French military victories - did not match any documents. Did you mean French military defeats?” This received over 50,000 hits in the first 18 hours of opening. Links near the top of the page lead to a simplified list of French military history. Even if you google “French military victories” now, it’s still the top result.

8. A bombing run targeting former US Senator Rick Santorum was embarked upon by columnist Dan Savage after the Senator made several controversial remarks towards homosexuality. The bombing was part of Savage’s plan to have the word “santorum” used for the combination of semen, lubricant and excrement that results from anal sex, and propelled the website created for that purpose to a high result for “santorum”.

9. Jewish writer Daniel Sieradski asked his blog readers to link to the Wikipedia article for “Jew” after he found that googling “Jew” returned the anti-Jewish website “Jew Watch” as the top entry. The bombing was a success and removed the site from the top result, but unfortunately Jew Watch still appears on the first page of results.

10. A search for “McDonald’s” was linked to the film Supersize Me, which was highly critical of the McDonald’s restaurant chain.

I’ve spoken to several people recently who don’t know whether they should go down the link building or link baiting road.

I’m going to try and outline the strengths and weakness of both techniques in this article.

Link Building:

It can’t be disputed that good quality link building is fantastically effective, anchor text controlled link building really can’t be beaten in terms of creating effective results. However, there are some downsides to link begging, or buying links on old, trusted sites that will push your website right to the top of Google. Some of these negatives are well know and include: Getting busted by Google’s webspam team, which would put you back many months.

Secondly, the cost involved in finding and securing dozens of high quality links per month. Building unfiltered, permanent links on old trusted sites, that are in-content and look natural is damn hard and as I’ve just said, darn expensive too. Average link costs, taking into account time and link costs are between $125 - $350 per link. I’d like to reiterate that the effectiveness of well build links should not be overlooked, however, for long term strategy it should be approached with caution as Google is coming down on paid links like a ton of bricks.

Link Baiting is a fantastic method for building large volumes of links, an added bonus is that more often than not, you can pickup some links which would otherwise be almost unobtainable. Writing a credible piece may get you some links from an authoritative government or university website with tons of trust and thousands of it’s own backlinks.

Success is hard to measure with link baiting, however, it’s not unusual to build thousands of links in a single exercise. In terms of cost, successful projects may have a cost from 10 cents to $2 per link. This is obviously much better value for money that manual link buying, a well executed link bait is five to ten times cheaper than buying the equivalent number of good quality links.

The downsides are that you cannot control the anchor text (which impacts rankings you are desperate to obtain), and many of the links will come from blogs. This means PageRank rains down like manna from Gods and then the majority of it ebbs away as the posts are archived, you will retain some link equity though. Learning to link bait is not exactly easy though, and consistent success takes a long time to learn.

Link baiting done correctly is the most cost and time effective method for building links. Period. It has it’s downsides but those can be overcome with clever ideas”steering” the anchor text in the bait.

Summary:

I think in the short term, its hard to make an impression in the short term without going out and finding at least a few links to get you going, with rules and guidelines changing, people are moving away from link buying and begging but it’s going to take a couple of years to see the effects.

I’d always suggest Social Media marketing for your long-term strategy though.

Formula 1 (F1) is the highest class of open wheel racing and is a very popular motor sport in Europe, which is becoming globalised. Each seasons eighteen races will be watched by more than a billion viewers. It is also a multi-billion dollar industry. For those in the USA who are less familiar with F1, the cars look similar to Indy cars, except they race on a circuit as opposed to an oval. While Indy is a Burger and Beer type of atmosphere, F1 is Champaign and Caviar.

So you would think you would be safe to believe that sponsoring a team would be great for your business and make your sales shoot through the roof? Not so. Notice the traffic trends below, kindly supplied by Robin Goad from Hitwise.

This chart shows two companies that sponsor one of the oldest teams, Williams F1. They have been racing successfully for thirty years.I chose two companies who haven’t sponsored a team before and don’t have a well know brand yet. This would give us a good idea as to how effective the sponsorship actually is.

The blue line shows a clothing fashion label called www.allsaints.co.uk, it shows a doubling of traffic at the start of the year. It is unclear what marketing efforts account for this at the start of the year. However, it is well before the F1 season starts and doesn’t seem to be associated with it. The traffic is still comparably low, suggesting they are getting less than 200,000 visitors per month.

The next company is called www.mydiamonds.com, a high end jewelry retailer. Unlike the previous example at the start of the season you can see a rise in traffic. However, the traffic does not really climb to any sort of substantial level. This would indicate that they only have a couple of thousand visitors per month looking at the graph. Take into consideration the amount they are paying to be a major sponsor of the team, and you’ll see that the direct return is extremly poor and does not represent good value in terms of ROI. My understanding is that they are paying between $5 Million & $10 Million dollars PER SEASON. Their web address is placed prominently on the rear wing of the car and gets a significant amount of TV time.

Give me a $10 Million dollar budget and I’d give you a return which is thousands of times better than what they are currently getting. I also checked their backlinks and they have fewer than 100!

Think carefully before investing in offline advertising or sponsorship which is costly. One maybe wiser and make a much higher return in a shorter timeframe to use Google and other major traffic generators.

Hands up if you’re tired of people droning on about how SEO is dying and in a few years there won’t be a need for it anymore.

The fact is, unless the world ends, SEO will never die.  However, SEO is getting and will become almost impossible for the majority of people. Google’s algorithm is getting tougher to crack and it becomes more difficult each day.

The good news is there is light at the end of the tunnel, while many SEO’s will go out of business as their spam becomes useless, the best will stay on top of what needs to be done and clean up. Really good Search Engine Optimizers will become very rich in the not to distant future.

As companies become increasingly desperate to get exposure on the Internet SEO’s will start to charge more, and that figure is going to multiply. I expect the demand will double every year as the number of credible SEO’s shrink. The actually dollar amount will rise dramatically, I wouldn’t be surprised if prices are five to ten times higher in a few years.

Speak to any SEO in a competitive market and they will tell you prices are going up, costs are rising as companies throw tons of money at Search Engine Optimization to stay competitive. All this is doing is raising the bench mark and the entry point to which businesses need to operate to market themselves on the Internet effectively. 

Become a great SEO and you’ll become rich, if you don’t, you won’t be in SEO for long. That’s a promise. 

I’ve prepared a comprehensive table to reference most of the major Social Media sites on the Internet at the moment. Instead of just focusing on the top three or four, try and leverage some of the smaller sites which maybe a little more relevant to what you are trying to publish.

Granted, they may only send a fraction of the traffic compared to the biggest social networks, however, it shouldn’t be overlooked as it could yield traffic and links which would otherwise be wasted.

Note: If you feel that I have missed one, please contact me and I’ll add it to the list.

I’d like to thank Brent Csutoras for his valuable input.

A potential client approached me wanting to promote his gay marriage website, I searched on Google for “gay marriage” and was surprised to see that Google is experimenting with its pages. See image below.

Matt Cutts follows very few people on Twitter compared with most, and I’ve compiled a list of who he follows. Some of the people on this list are some of the most influential people on the Internet, especially in SEO circles. If you’re on this list and reading this post, then consider yourself a success. Congratulations.

I’ve created this table for people to see what Matt Cutts thinks is relevant and what is not. There’s so much noise on the internet, it’s hard to tell what the good stuff is. I’ve found several blogs that I’d never heard of, but they offered really good information.

There were a few people who I thought Matt Cutts would be following who were not on the list. The most surprising absentee was Aaron Wall from SEO Book.

Note: I don’t know many of the people on this list personally, and their descriptions may be slightly inaccurate. Also, many of these people have more than one website, whereas I’ve just listed one.

I was inspired to do a post on how to linkbait without using the social networks. That means not submitting to Digg, Reddit or any other of the big network sites and still having your piece go viral.

Too many people see the social networks as the only key to their success. If you spend several days creating a widget, great article or whatever. You want to make sure that it stands the best chance of gaining traction and getting a ton of traffic and hopefully links.

The key to your success is in two parts:

1) A fantastic piece of bait:

Good promotion on Digg, Stumble or some of the other networks can hide a crappy piece of bait. If you want your linkbait to gain serious momentum outside of the networks your bait needs to be exceptional. It really does need to be good enough so that you can gain some links without asking.

2) Good relationships with other bloggers: *

Getting some linkbait viral needs good exposure at the start, you need to get plenty of eyeballs on your bait. Once a small group of people start blogging about your bait more people should see their blogs and then those will catch on and all of a sudden you’ll have thousands of visitors and these should translate into links.

I think it’s hard to make relationships with influential bloggers, it’s also very time consuming. However, it’s something you should do as you develop your business. The most successul SEO’s and linkbaiters all have good relationships with each other. Aaron Wall from SEO Book is a big advocator of business relationships between bloggers.

There is a quicker way to getting high exposure on influential, busy blogs. The way to do that is to find bloggers who do sponsored posts. Imagine if your linkbait was mentioned on Shoemoney’s blog? It’s almost guaranteed to take off if the piece has been designed properly. I personally use this method for some of my linkbait pieces and it works very, very well. I’ve never used Shoemoney’s blog though as he is pretty expensive - at around $4000 per review.

The best way to find some people to blog about your piece is to use the blog networks, I’d say Review Me was the best. You could get your linkbait viral within a matter of days if you select the correct blogs to go onto. Stay away from the low end Blog networks like Pay-Per-Post as many of the blogs don’t have enough traffic to get your piece viral, and will make your linkbait look like spam should a Google engineer look into it.

Don’t forget to ask the blog owner to “nofollow” the post, so you stay within Googles guidelines. You don’t need to worry about not having those few links that have been “nofollowed” as your piece should go viral and you may get thousands of legitimate links.

Lastly, there is one more way of linkbaiting without the Social Networks, and that is to email relevant bloggers with your linkbait and see if you can get a few dozen links. It’s a little harder than using a blog network as the linkbait really needs to appeal to them. Building relationships with relevant bloggers doesn’t hurt either. I’ll save that for another post though.